Twenty-Eight

Navarro’s reaction wasn’t what I’d expected. Just a slight hesitation before she said, “You’re lying.”

“I have an eyewitness to the shooting. He’s down on the beach.” Somewhere down there, and probably panicked at finding me gone. “And the San Diego police have made a positive I.D. on Stan’s body. They’ve been trying to contact you since shortly after you came down here.”

She studied my face, her expression giving no clue as to what she was thinking.

I reached into my pocket and took out a slip of paper on which I’d written Gary Viner’s name and phone number. “This is the detective in charge of the case. He’ll confirm.”

“It’s a setup.”

“You don’t really believe that.“

Her eyes moved to the paper. She bit her lip again, then reached for it. “I’ll call him. Wait here.”

Such bravado in spite of the gun I held both impressed and amused me. “No, that’s not how it works.”

“How, then?” Impatient now to get on with it.

“We’ll go over the wall the way I came. Down the beach to the access point, where I have a car equipped with a cellular phone. You’ll call Viner from there.”

Navarro crossed her arms. “How do I know—”

“You don’t. But you have no choice, do you?”

She shivered slightly, glanced at the door to the house.

“Let’s go,” I said.

She went ahead of me, crossing the wall clumsily, wincing when the cactus spines raked her skin. I had to give her credit: she never once cried out. When we were past them, I motioned for her to start down the slope. We descended and moved up the beach in tandem, keeping clear of what light the windows of the neighboring villas cast on the sand. Finally we reached the path to the parking area.

The Seville sat alone where Hy and I had left it. I urged Navarro toward it, then realized he had the keys. Why the hell hadn’t I—

“Jesus, McCone, I can’t turn my back on you for a minute!” Hy’s head appeared from where he crouched on the other side of the car. Nodding, he said, “Ms. Navarro.”

Navarro recognized him and stiffened.

“The eyewitness I mentioned,” I told her. “I believe you’ve met.” To him I added, “She’s decided to call Lieutenant Viner.”

“Smart choice.” He tossed me the car keys, held open the passenger’s door, and motioned her inside; shut it and leaned against it. I got into the driver’s seat, flicked on the electrical system, and lowered the passenger-side window so Hy could hear. Holding the phone up so Navarro could see I was dialing the number on the paper she clutched, I made the call and handed the receiver to her.

Navarro pressed it to her ear. After a few seconds her eyes grew wide and her fingers tensed; she asked the SDPD operator for Viner’s extension. Identified herself and listened.

“I see. … Yes. … I’ll …” She glanced at the gun I held. “I don’t know exactly when I’ll return to California, but I’ll be in touch with you.”

Viner spoke some more.

“Yes, she’s here.” Navarro handed the phone to me.

“McCone, what the hell is going on?” Gary demanded.

“I told you I’d have Ms. Navarro contact you. And I—”

“I’m tired of this runaround. I want you in my office—”

“I’ll see you in less than twelve hours.” Saying it gave me a rush of confidence. Maybe saying it would make it so.…

“What time?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“McCone—”

I was tired of arguing with him, so I broke the connection. When I glanced at Hy, he looked amused.

Navarro sat with her head down, hands twisted in her lap, still clutching the slip of paper. “It’s true,” she said, a desolate note underscoring her words.

“It’s true.”

She raised her head, turned to look at Hy. “You were there with him?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

He squatted beside the car, described the scene more tersely than he had to me. Navarro listened silently, flinching when he got to the part about Stan being shot.

After Hy finished I said, “Everything’s coming unraveled, Ann. You’d better cooperate with us.”

No reply.

“You’re in very big trouble,” I added. “Kidnapping, accessory to transporting a kidnap victim over an international boundary. If Mourning dies, it’s special circumstances—carries the death penalty.”

When she still didn’t say anything, Hy asked, “Where’s Fontes?”

“… He flew to Mexico City with the letter of credit late this afternoon. He was going to … He said he was going to meet Stan there and put the L.C. through in the morning. Then they’d come back here to divide the money. But now I know that Stan’s—” She shook her head.

“What about Timothy?”

“At the villa. They’ve kept him doped up since … since this morning.”

Hy said, “You know they’re going to kill him.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be that way!”

He gave her a skeptical look, but didn’t comment.

I said, “You also must realize what Fontes and Salazar plan for you.”

Navarro still didn’t want to believe what was happening. She put out her hands, fending off reality. “How do I know any of what you say is the truth?”

“You talked to Viner. That wasn’t a setup.”

“But about Diane—how do I know she’s really alive?”

I picked up the phone and held it out to her. “Call Cabrillo Hospital in San Diego. Ask for a report on her condition. When I saw her earlier, she was critical but stable. She was even able to talk with me for a while.”

Navarro looked at the phone but didn’t take it. “Okay, maybe that’s so. But if Fontes is going to kill me and keep all the money, why did he send Diane back to the States? He could’ve just let her die.”

“Her continued existence, as well as Tim’s, is insurance that he’ll get the money. He won’t know for sure that you’ve been straight with him until the L.C. clears. If anything goes wrong in Mexico City, he’s got the ammunition to force you to cooperate. Diane’s a co-conspirator; Tim’s a victim. They could testify against you.”

“But he’s treated me like a business associate, a guest in his home. He hasn’t restricted me in any way.”

“Of course not. He doesn’t want you to suspect what he plans to do. He’d probably have let you go on believing you were to get your share of the money right up till the end. But finally the time would have come for him to dispose of his liabilities—namely Tim, Diane, and you. Easy to get rid of you and Tim, and Diane wouldn’t be that much of a problem. If I could get to her in the hospital, so can Salazar or one of Fontes’s people.”

Panic seeped into her eyes as she finally accepted reality. “I can’t go back to that house!”

“Well, where do you expect to go?” Hy gestured at the darkness around us.

Her gaze moved from me to him, pleading.

“No,” he said, “we’re not going to help you.”

“Unless you help us,” I added.

Silence. Hy’s eyes met mine. We waited.

“All right,” Navarro said heavily. “What do you want me to do?”

“Help us get Mourning out of there.”

“That’s impossible. You’d have to get past Salazar, Jaime, and Gilbert’s bodyguard.”

“Two bodyguards,” Hy corrected her. “Fontes has two.” Obviously Tomás or someone else at the riverbed had been able to help him.

“One’s with him in Mexico City.”

“Okay,” I said, “we’re dealing with the one bodyguard, Salazar, and Jaime. Anybody else on the premises?”

“The cook and the maid don’t live in. The maid brought some ice into the living room about half an hour before I came outside; she said they were both going home.”

“What about the bartender?”

“Just somebody who comes in when Fontes has people over.”

“Salazar didn’t bring anybody with him but Jaime?”

She shook her head.

“Okay, give us some idea of the layout of the villa—where Mourning’s being held, where everybody else is sleeping.”

Navarro began to talk, describing the rooms and various locations. She and Salazar were in the wing that looked like a bell tower; the others were in the shorter wing at the opposite end of the house. Mourning’s room was on the ground floor between those of the bodyguards, while Jaime slept directly upstairs.

Hy asked, “Is there a security system?”

“Not that I know of.”

“And have all the others gone to bed?”

“I think so, but you never know with Salazar. He prowls.”

Hy’s mouth twisted wryly and he touched his left arm. “I’m painfully aware of that.” He glanced across Navarro at me. “I’d better check it out with the camera.”

“Okay.” I watched him move toward the path to the beach.

His departure made Navarro nervous, as if she feared me more than him. She looked away to her right, shredding what remained of the slip of paper with Viner’s number on it. When I used the automatic controls to raise her window and lock her door, she started.

I asked, “Will Salazar go looking for you if he finds you’re not where he left you?”

“I doubt it. So long as my car’s still there, he’ll think I’ve gone to bed.”

“Will he check your room?”

“It wouldn’t do him any good. I’ve kept it locked the whole time I’ve been here, even when I wasn’t in there.” She reached into her pocket and showed me a key.

“Just how doped up is Tim?”

She considered. “He was mobile, but pretty spaced out earlier today. They probably knocked him out for the night, though.”

I tried to picture rescuing a heavily drugged man from the guarded house. A seemingly impossible task. And then there was the problem of moving him across the border once we got to Tijuana. The coyote, Al Mojas, might balk at the increased danger. I supposed we could hole up somewhere in the border city, make our move the next night when Mourning would be more alert, but I didn’t like that, either. Every additional minute we spent in Baja could be fatal.

Of course, there was La Procuraduría de Protección al Turista—the Attorney General for the Protection of the Tourist. Wasn’t that the agency all the guidebooks told you to contact if you had legal trouble down here? Oh, sure. La Procuraduría probably lived in Fontes’s hip pocket; Gilbert would be waiting on its doorstep to welcome us. Besides, Mexico’s judicial system operates on the Napoleonic Code: you’re guilty until proven innocent. And we were about to be guilty as hell of breaking into Fontes’s villa.

To take my mind off all the possible pitfalls, I decided to clear up some details that had been bothering me. I asked Navarro, “You were holding Tim at your house near Blossom Hill?”

“… Yes. We didn’t … treat him badly.”

Even though you intended to kill him later. “How did Fontes figure out where he was?”

“Diane let it slip. She drinks, and when she drinks, she talks too much.”

“Didn’t it make you suspicious of Fontes’s intentions when Jaime brought Tim here last night?”

“How do you know all this?”

“You’ve been under surveillance for quite some time now.”

“Oh. Well … yes, at first I wondered, but then Gilbert took me aside and explained that he felt it’d be safer for all of us to be down here in Baja. He pays protection to the federal police, you see. It made sense, and besides, I’d been worried about Tim. He was alone with nobody to look after him. At first I planned only to stay down here the one night.”

“What explanation did Fontes give you for having the L.C.?”

“He told me that a few years ago, before Stan and I were married, Stan got into big-time financial trouble and borrowed heavily from him to bail himself out. The note had come due, so Stan gave Fontes the L.C. as security against his being repaid out of our share of the proceeds. It surprised me, but I figured Stan knew what he was doing. I was the only one who could activate the process of drawing on it, through my contact at Colores.”

“Had Stan ever mentioned this financial problem to you?”

“No.”

“Or the outstanding loan?”

“No.”

“Had he ever even mentioned knowing Gilbert Fontes?”

She shook her head, eyes turned down.

“ And you—a smart businesswoman—bought the whole story, just like that?”

“Fontes had the L.C,” she said defensively. “He knew all about the kidnapping. He contacted Diane first, and she contacted me. We decided it was best to come down here and talk with him. Before we did, I spoke with Gilbert; I’d been getting panicky because I hadn’t heard from Stan. He gave me the name of the hotel where Stan was supposed to be staying in Mexico City. I called there; he was registered.”

“But you didn’t talk with him.”

“He wasn’t in his room.”

“You leave a message?”

“Yes.”

“But he never called back.”

“I left to come down here before he would have had a chance. Besides, I knew Stan would need a tourist card to register at a hotel on the mainland, and to get one, you have to show I.D.”

“There was no I.D. on Stan’s body. And you heard Ripinsky’s account of the night of the shooting: Salazar was outside the adobe listening to what he and Stan were saying. That’s how Fontes knew about the kidnapping—and what kind of story to tell you.”

“All right, I’ve been stupid! But you don’t know Fontes, how convincing he can be. Besides, I wanted to believe him. Otherwise, it would have meant that Stan …”

“Which is exactly what it did mean.”

“Stop it!” She pressed her hands to her ears.

I stopped. No matter what this woman had done, badgering her was a cheap indulgence. She’d get plenty of that soon enough from the authorities, the prosecuting attorneys, and her own conscience—providing she had one.

But there were other things I wanted to know. “Ann, why did Diane Mourning contact you and Stan about kidnapping her husband?”

She drew her hands together in her Lap, fighting to regain her composure. The question gave her focus; after a moment she replied calmly, “She contacted Stan. He’d known both Mournings well a few years before. They were heavy contributors to a fund-raising campaign Stan ran for the fishing industry. They needed a source of dolphin cartilage for that drug their company is developing, and they thought if they supported the fishing industry, they’d make contacts who would help them.”

“So Stan met them at a fund-raiser?”

She nodded. “This was back before I knew him. Stan got to be friends with them; they spent a lot of time together. The Mournings were living pretty high back then. Too high, I guess, because a couple of years later they had to sell their boat and vacation home in Laguna Beach, and then their condo in San Francisco. After that, Stan said, he didn’t hear much from them; it works that way when your friends slip into a lower financial bracket.”

“So when did Diane reestablish contact with Stan?”

Navarro’s mouth turned down. “A few months ago— March, maybe. She showed up at his office. She told him the labs were in trouble and Tim had lost interest in his work— in her, too. She’d found out he had somebody else that he was serious about, and she was afraid he was working up to leaving her. She played on Stan’s sympathies.”

Navarro looked down at her clenched hands. Separated them and rubbed them against her thighs, then brought them together lightly. “Stan and Diane started sleeping together. I found that out from his secretary. And next thing I knew, the kidnapping was all planned.”

“Why’d you go along with it?”

She shrugged.

“You must have some idea.”

“Well, the money, partly. Diane was going to split it fifty-fifty with us.”

“Didn’t it bother you to kidnap and kill someone?”

“We weren’t going to kill him!”

“Come on, Ann. Mourning might not have known who you were, but he and Stan had been friends.”

“Stan wore a disguise. And I was the one who took food and stuff to Tim. I even wore a wig.”

“Oh, Ann, Ripinsky saw through Stan’s disguise right away, and from a distance. Of course Stan planned to kill Tim. And on some level you knew that.”

She sighed deeply.

“How could you have believed what Stan told you, when you knew he was sleeping with Tim’s wife?”

“… I don’t know. Maybe I thought if I helped him, I could hold him. Stan slept around a lot; I couldn’t believe Diane was that important to him. But I don’t know. My whole life before Stan, I never trusted any man, never gave in to anybody. I didn’t want to be like my mother, you see—always doing for other people, always having babies, always saying yes, yes, yes. But when I married Stan … he was stronger than me, and I just got weaker. The worst of it is, I don’t know why. And now it’s too late.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

Hy appeared, moving swiftly. I lowered the window, and he leaned toward it. “We better move now. Salazar was out prowling, but he’s gone inside again. When I left off watching him, he was upstairs.”

I nodded. Hy went around to Navarro’s door, gun in hand. I unlocked it, and she got out.

I started the car and turned it around so it was pointed at the road. Left it with the doors locked, pocketed the keys, and joined Hy and Navarro by the path to the beach.

“We’ll go back the way we came,” I told her. “Ripinsky’ll be in front of you, I’ll be behind. When we get to the villa, you’ll take us to Mourning’s room. Don’t try to warn anybody. If you do, I won’t hesitate to kill you.”

Navarro looked more convinced by my words than I was; she compressed her lips and glanced at Hy.

He said, “Don’t look at me. I won’t hesitate, either.”

As he spoke I caught a glimpse of the violence that simmered beneath his civilized exterior. I had no doubt he meant what he’d said. As for myself, I’d never know exactly what I was capable of until I was called to action.